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Post by Wasp on Dec 28, 2009 0:10:12 GMT
Exposed: Gerry Adams' lies over brother's Sinn Féin role
Photo shows Dundalk canvass with brother Liam at time he says they were 'estranged'
Suzanne Breen, Northern Editor
Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams actively canvassed for the party in the general election of 1997 with his suspected paedophile brother Liam – in a period he claims they were estranged.
Today we publish photographs showing Gerry and Liam Adams canvassing side-by-side for Sinn Féin in Dundalk at a date when Gerry Adams insists his brother had been expelled from the party.
Liam Adams, who is wanted by the PSNI on charges that he repeatedly raped his daughter Aine from the age of four, is seen canvassing in a shopping centre and Dundalk streets and laughing with his brother Gerry, just days before the 6 June 1997 Dáil election.
A Co Louth republican said: "I'm horrified that, 10 years after Gerry Adams was told his brother was a child rapist, he accompanied him through the streets of Dundalk, meeting women and children. We are all shocked Liam Adams was allowed to be in Sinn Féin so long. We are disgusted at Gerry Adams's cover-up."
Last week, the Sunday Tribune reported that Liam Adams had put himself forward as a nominee for the Sinn Féin 1997 Dáil candidacy in Louth. At a selection convention, he saw he didn't garner enough support and publicly withdrew. The candidacy was secured by hardline republican, Owenie Hanratty.
Commenting on this newspaper's report, Gerry Adams said: "When I heard Liam was in Sinn Féin, and when I heard somebody was putting it about that perhaps he would be a candidate, I moved immediately both to stop that and get him dumped out of Sinn Féin ... I moved very, very quickly."
But far from being "dumped", Liam Adams remained fully active in the party with his brother's endorsement months later. By accompanying Liam Adams on the canvass for Hanratty, the Sinn Féin president effectively promoted his brother in the eyes of the local party and community.
Gerry Adams happily posed with Liam – along with Owenie Hanratty and Hanratty's wife Marie and election agent Fra Browne – for the Dundalk Argus newspaper. The photo -graph, taken days earlier, appeared in the paper on 6 June 1997. Bar Gerry Adams, no-one else in the photograph knew Liam Adams was a suspected paedophile.
During the canvass, Liam Adams proudly sported a Sinn Féin badge. The Sunday Tribune has been told Gerry Adams regularly visited his brother's home in Muirhevnamor and stayed overnight at a time when he claimed to he was "estranged" from him.
Liam Adams handed himself into Sligo gardaí last week, but wasn't arrested because the PSNI hadn't prepared an extradition warrant. He has denied raping Aine.
Sinn Féin claims that Liam Adams played a short, minor role in the party are strongly challenged by many republicans. One said: "Liam was active in Sinn Féin in Dundalk for at least seven years. He was synonymous with the party's name here. He was seen as an asset to Sinn Féin and the community.
"He breathed new life into the Muirhevnamor cumann. He set up many community schemes. He was the Dundalk face of Gerry Adams. He was always referring to his brother saying 'Our fellow says this ...' and 'Our fellow's in the know on that'."
The source said Liam Adams's loyalty was "first and foremost to Gerry rather than to the republican movement" which sometimes caused clashes with local republicans: "He constantly promoted the Belfast leadership's position which didn't go down well. But he was a nice guy who was well-liked.
"After one heated meeting on the Mitchell principles (of peace and non-violence), he went for a pint afterwards with those he'd rowed with." The source said Liam Adams attended hundreds of Sinn Féin meetings, nearly all of which were minuted. He said Liam Adams left Dundalk "still a member of Sinn Féin" in August 1998.
Bizarrely, Liam Adams is quoted in the Irish Independent in July 1998 as a "youth community leader" in Dundalk talking about a "very well organised" paedophile ring which may have links in Donegal. Liam Adams previously lived in Donegal.
Another source said Liam Adams set up homework clubs for children.
December 27, 2009
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Post by collina on Dec 30, 2009 14:34:46 GMT
Truly appalling.
I wonder what Setanta would have to say about all this.
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Post by Wasp on Dec 30, 2009 19:23:23 GMT
Truly appalling. I wonder what Setanta would have to say about all this. Maybe he knew and that was why he left before all this came out. |
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Post by Wasp on Dec 30, 2009 19:26:05 GMT
And PS collina that's why I like you, you are not scared to speak out against anything irish/republican, and you dont go all defensive either.  |
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Post by collina on Dec 31, 2009 19:36:04 GMT
This is awful.
Here we have a four-year old child who was raped.
Sinn Fein told us that the British were not fit to govern or to administrate a justice system in Northern Ireland. Yet the Sinn Fein response to criminal behaviour by teenagers in its own community was to torture them and in many cases permanently disable them. Now we see that the President of Sinn Fein covered up for child abusers in the very same manner that the RCC did. Hard to contemplate when in fact the RCC is a de-facto paedophile empire.
No wonder Sinn Fein have sat idly by in Dail Eireann as the recent reports on clerical child abuse have surfaced. They knew.
I hate to pick on things but I always wondered how the PUL community could turn a blind eye to the likes of Lenny Murphy or Billy Wright. Now I know; its no fuckin wonder.
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Post by Wasp on Jan 1, 2010 3:01:13 GMT
Anyone from any community who takes pleasure in these revelations is as bad as the abusers themselves. I do not gloat because this again proves the hypocricy of sf/ira, I would feel the same if it was someone from my community or any community.
Collina could you explain your last line if you dont mind as I dont understand your wording or rather what you mean by your wording?
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Post by Wasp on Jan 1, 2010 3:03:52 GMT
The IRA boasted about shooting child abusers. How very odd that they ignored the vile crimes of Gerry Adams' father and brother
Shed a tear for Gerry Adams MP, as he tours the TV studios trying to save his career and his reputation in the face of those 'with political axes to grind' who are determined to judge a good man harshly just because of family embarrassments.
Well, no. Please don't. This horrible man is now rightly on the rack because his niece Aine - who as a 13-year-old in 1987 told Uncle Gerry that his brother Liam had raped and abused her from the age of four - has very belatedly gone public on the allegations.
What's more, Uncle Gerry admits that he believed her all those years ago, which makes it inexplicable that Liam was later allowed to work for several years with the young in Adams's West Belfast fiefdom.
The IRA heartlands such as West Belfast are areas where Republicans proudly claim they look after their own community, and punish drug pushers and sex abusers - except, it now appears, where those criminals are related to the elite.
Yet Adams, who covered up the crime - thus almost colluding in it - is looking for sympathy. 'For me, it's like a permanent bereavement,' he says, with a sob in his voice. 'My focus is on the plight of Aine.'
Like hell it is. Gerry Adams's focus is where it always is: on the well-being of Gerry Adams, the murderous thugs he calls freedom fighters and on their pursuit of power at any cost.
To beef up his pleas for sympathy, Adams has revealed that he learned for the first time ten years ago that his father, Gerry Snr, had sexually, emotionally, psychologically and physically abused members of the family.
When his father died in 2003, Gerry Jnr now reveals he regretted that this convicted Republican terrorist - who has been referred to as 'the dirty wee man' and 'the babysitter' - had the Irish tricolour on his coffin: 'I think he besmirched it, but it was a dilemma for other members of my family who felt that they didn't want this, at that time, out in the open.'
This is a perfect example of Adams's perverted vision. He was upset to discover his father's dirty little secret, but he had no problems about giving Republican funerals to people who killed children with their bombs, knee-capped and tortured teenagers and left thousands of little ones traumatised by the killing or injuring of their parents or siblings.
I have always abhorred Adams, not just because I knew him to have been from the early 1970s a pitiless leader of the brutal IRA, but because he was additionally a smug, complacent, self-righteous liar and hypocrite who persuaded the gullible that he was a spiritually minded, caring, tree-hugging peacenik.
He even had the effrontery to deny in all three volumes of his autobiography that he had been even an ordinary member of the terrorist organisation of which he was kingpin.
Before the Sinn Fein publicity machine urges that everything I say should be discounted because I have a political axe to grind, let me mention that the last time I wrote a really horrid piece about a Northern Ireland politician was about that roaring bigot Ian Paisley, Adams's sworn enemy for more than 30 years.
But my anger about Paisley was nothing compared to the rage and nausea I feel about Adams. This is a man who, unbelievably, has agreed to make a forthcoming documentary for Channel 4 about his relationship with Jesus, yet stands revealed as someone who, rather than suffering the little children to come to him, abandoned them to an abuser.
According to Aine, the facts are that from 1978 her father regularly beat up her mother Sally badly enough to make her run from the house, thus giving him the opportunity to sexually assault his elder daughter. Like most abused children, at the time Aine told no one.
In 1983, Sally threw Liam out, made a bonfire of all his possessions and stopped him seeing his children.
As for Aine, she had some peace until at the end of 1985 when she discovered her father had a new wife and another little girl. Worries about how this child might be abused persuaded her to tell her own terrible story to her mother.
It was now 1987, and Sally took her to the police, the social services and all-powerful Uncle Gerry, who was told that a police medical examination had corroborated Aine's story.
Aine remembers her uncle being sympathetic and taking her and her mother to a pointless meeting at which her father denied everything. But she also remembers being persuaded not to proceed with the charges, although she never retracted her story.
At various times over the next few years, Uncle Gerry promised to persuade Liam to apologise and repent, but nothing happened and she stopped seeing Gerry Adams when he began to speak of Liam as a victim ('Our Liam can't deal with what he did to you.')
Living in Scotland, Aine did not know that her uncle allowed her father to work from 1998 to 2003 in a youth club right under his nose - something he could have stopped with one word in the local priest's ear - and later nearby as a youth development officer.
Aine decided a year ago that since her father had refused to admit what he'd done to her, she would finally pursue him through the courts.
A warrant has been out for his arrest for a year - Liam disappeared after refusing to attend a Belfast court hearing when charges were brought - and on Friday, Aine waived her right to anonymity by telling her story on television.
Gerry Adams has said that while he might not have followed absolutely the textbook approach to dealing with a paedophile, it is the fault of the police and the social services that his brother wasn't dealt with. For his part, he was trying to deal with family problems in a 'therapeutic way. . . there's only so much an individual can do - it's up to the agencies'.
Today, Adams's future as president and international ambassador for Sinn Fein is in serious doubt. The denizens of his constituency are well aware that the IRA knee-capped many a man for even minor sexual misdemeanours and would normally have murdered anyone alleged to have raped a child.
The timing of these increasingly sordid revelations could not be worse for Adams, for the Republic of Ireland is suffering its own collective trauma at revelations that, over many years, the Roman Catholic hierarchy covered up priestly abuse of children, with collusion from police, politicians and the establishment in general.
The mood is vengeful, with demands for episcopal heads to roll coming from all sections of society. Three weeks ago, in the Irish parliament, Sinn Fein's Human Rights spokesman denounced those who 'colluded in crime, in depraved sexual attacks, in an abuse of power and influence, they perverted the course of justice, they protected the guilty.
'They, the paedophile priests, the bishops, archbishops and police who protected them, I believe, and many others believe, are culpable in the deaths by suicide of many, many abused children or later adults whose lives were destroyed by the paedophiles and their protectors.'
He called for society 'to expose the wrong done to those children and ensure that every step is taken to pursue the perpetrators and those who failed or purposely refused to carry out their duties to protect children and to investigate and prosecute criminals.'
When will Sinn Fein apply these fine principles to its own President, Gerry Adams?
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Post by Wasp on Jan 1, 2010 3:04:30 GMT
The IRA's culture of silence extended to child abuse
Gerry Adams is praised for his honesty about his family's sins, yet his protestations are hollow
Nick Cohen
The Observer, Sunday 27 December 2009
The alleged child abuse in Gerry Adams's family is close to being a perfect metaphor for Ireland's failure to confront the disaster of violent republicanism. With sexual violence as with political violence, with the personal as well as the political, Irish nationalism cannot break from the dire illusions of the past.
As of Christmas, we had learnt that in 1987, 14-year-old Aine Adams claimed to her Uncle Gerry that her father – his brother, Liam – had been abusing her since she was four years old. He believed her. "She was always a very good wee girl; I just couldn't imagine a child like her making up such a serious allegation," he told Ulster TV, before going on to reveal that his father, whom he had buried with full republican honours, had also been a paedophile. Inadvertently or not, the unexpected baring of a soul few suspected he possessed diverted attention and it took a few days for the press to move from praising Adams's "bravery" in emoting about his father to the practical question of what he had done for his niece and for other potential victims.
As far as I can see, for 22 years, he did next to nothing until Aine forced the issue by going on camera. She told Adams she had proved that there was a prima facie case to answer by agreeing to a police medical examination. Instead of being supported, Aine was persuaded to stop co-operating with the forces of British imperialism. In 1995, Adams went further and insisted that all abused Catholic boys and girls should refuse to talk to the RUC because the authorities used "these issues for their own militaristic ends".
If the implication behind his words was that Sinn Fein would provide paramilitaries to watch suspected paedophiles on behalf of the boys and girls of Derry and West Belfast, then he never delivered on the promise to Aine. Liam Adams went on to find employment as a youth worker, in Dundalk and then at Belfast's Clonard Monastery. Adams said he told the monastery of his concerns about his brother. The Clonard Youth Centre told the Irish Times it could find no record of his warning. Managers of the youth centre in Dundalk added that neither Gerry Adams nor the local Sinn Fein branch, of which Liam was a member, thought to tell them that maybe he should not be working with children. When Liam Adams remarried to have more children, a photographer captured a grinning Gerry at the wedding feast.
Aine concluded that Adams wanted to shut her up and turn his "brother into the victim". As the scandal threatened Adams's career last week, many in Ireland wanted to see him as a victim as well. To cite a typical instance, when Eamon Keane asked a furious Sinn Fein spokeswoman a few polite questions on his show on Newstalk radio, the listeners exploded. They praised Adams's "courage" and denounced the mean "agenda" of his critics. "Shut your gob," cried one. "Gerry Adams is a good man. This is a family matter and should be dealt with inside the family."
Keeping child abuse private has all but destroyed Irish Catholicism, which also uses the language of victimhood and persecution complexes to deflect legitimate questions. But in the case of Irish republicanism, worries about paedophiles feel comically misplaced. Journalists are criticising Adams for failing to protect children when he was at the top of a movement that killed children. They can do so with a straight face because the Good Friday Agreement was meant to have made Sinn Fein and the front organisations for unionist death squads "normal" parties. Politicians and pundits insist we must thank them for not trying to kill us anymore. I would be more grateful if one price of the peace process had not been the propagation of dangerous myths.
The language of "process" suggests that today's settlement flowed from the thousands of murders of the dirty war of 1969 to 1997; that sectarianism produced a reward of sorts. Sinn Fein has a propaganda interest in covering up the blunt fact that the police and army wore down the IRA by riddling it with double agents, but that is no reason for others to go along with the fantasy that the war had a point. Even if it had been a better fighting force, the IRA could never have won because the idea of bombing Ulster into a united Ireland was absurd as well as immoral. For all its constitutional claims to the north and sincere concerns for Catholics, the Republic never wanted to integrate a million Ulster Protestants.
A few months after Aine asked her uncle for help, I watched a Sinn Fein press conference in London follow the usual pattern of the 1980s. British journalists delivered stock denunciations of Adams's support for violence. Adams gave his stock answer that partition was the real cause of a conflict that could not stop until north and south united.
"But," I interrupted, "the south doesn't want the north."
For the first and only time in my career, I made a politician start. "If I believed that, I would give up," he mumbled in reply. He gave up in the end, but not for any prize that was worth the cost, but for a power-sharing agreement that had been on the table since the Sunningdale talks of 1973.
The thousands of dead of the intervening years, the ethnic cleansing of Belfast housing estates and Armagh farmsteads and the brutalisation of a generation of working-class Catholic and Protestant children merely produced the revolting spectacle of Sinn Fein, the worst of Irish nationalism, embracing the Democratic Unionist party, the worst of Ulster Protestantism, and dividing the quango posts between them.
Last week, the police warned that support for republican splinter groups was growing. The new terrorists say, as Adams once said, that the older generation betrayed the cause and that with one last heave they can achieve the republican dream. In a country where history has repeated itself always as tragedy and never as farce, the refusal of over-delicate politicians and commentators to tell the real story of the last, futile IRA campaign will only sustain the bloody illusions of the next wave of Uncle Gerrys.
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Post by collina on Jan 1, 2010 15:32:54 GMT
Anyone from any community who takes pleasure in these revelations is as bad as the abusers themselves. I do not gloat because this again proves the hypocricy of sf/ira, I would feel the same if it was someone from my community or any community. Collina could you explain your last line if you dont mind as I dont understand your wording or rather what you mean by your wording? There was a tolerance in Loyalist/Unionist areas for shooting Sinn Fein members. I had always thought that murder is murder, and that killing someone without trial is murder. I believed it credible that someone could be a member of Sinn Fein and not support the IRA. Therefor an individual could not be guilty by mere association with Sinn Fein. Now however we see the true face of this organisation and its leader who proclaimed not to belong to the IRA. They are worthless creatures and I can understand why Loyalists thought little of their murders. Funny how Setanta has legged it. He must have known Liam Adams very well, given they were in the same Louth constituency. I suspect poor Setanta has learned about these events before we knew. He'll probably end up in the Green Party. |
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Post by Wasp on Jan 1, 2010 21:22:38 GMT
To explaoin my own position, sf members were the mouthpieces of the ira and many were also members of the ira including its leadership. Thousands of interviews on tv, the newspapers etc never ever showed any sf member stating he did not support the ira or condemn any ira atrocity. That is proof in itself the evil that ran through sf/ira and this made them legitimate targets to retaliate against after ira attacks. It was this type of targeting that helped bring the ira to the peace process IMHO.
I cant speak for the republic but my point above shows this not to be credible at all during the troubles in N.I anyway.
See above answers.
Fair point
Exactly Collina and what makes it even more obvious is the fact he deleted all his posts, like a clean up act which sf/ira are notorioius for, see McCartney murder as a prime example.
I am of the opinion setanta knew. BTW what effect has this had on sf in the republic???
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Post by collina on Jan 2, 2010 2:15:47 GMT
To explaoin my own position, sf members were the mouthpieces of the ira and many were also members of the ira including its leadership. Thousands of interviews on tv, the newspapers etc never ever showed any sf member stating he did not support the ira or condemn any ira atrocity. That is proof in itself the evil that ran through sf/ira and this made them legitimate targets to retaliate against after ira attacks. It was this type of targeting that helped bring the ira to the peace process IMHO. I cant speak for the republic but my point above shows this not to be credible at all during the troubles in N.I anyway. See above answers. Fair point Exactly Collina and what makes it even more obvious is the fact he deleted all his posts, like a clean up act which sf/ira are notorioius for, see McCartney murder as a prime example. I am of the opinion setanta knew. BTW what effect has this had on sf in the republic??? I don't know WASP. I've not not been a member of SF. I think Setanta only found out recently. |
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